Dogs at the Perimeter Page 14

  He studied Kwan and remembered his kid brother, the way Hiroji never spoke out of turn, never spoke without some prodding. If you didn’t know him as James did, you would have thought that Hiroji was a bit slow, a bit dull, but really he was constantly rearranging things in his mind, he was opening and filing the information as it arrived, rather than letting it overflow and become meaningless. Yes, his brother was careful and he had been that way even when he was small. In the corner of the room, Hiroji, or was it Kwan or was it some metamorphosis of the two or was it James as he once was, the James that might have grown up in Tokyo with a father and a language of his own, with a box in his heart to hide his fear, shifted his weight and knelt on the ground so now they could see each other clearly, on the same level. The boy studied him. There was one man in this room and one ghost. When James woke at the next knocking on the door, it was still pouring, rain was running thinly across the floor, cupping the light all to itself.

  “Kwan?” the man’s voice said.

  James made no answer.

  “Kwan?”

  James reached out and plucked the weeds growing through cracks, he ate them and drank, foolishly, the dirty groundwater. Eventually, he heard the sound of the man’s rubber sandals on the concrete landing, walking away. James’s clothes were wet and they stank of the earth outdoors.

  There’s a room full of injured people and it brims with rot and excrement. The man brings James here in the middle of the night but what the hell is he supposed to do with no drugs, no nothing, barely even light to work by. He throws his hands up in frustration but the man doesn’t seem to get it, he just watches expectantly as if James is Jesus with forty loaves at his beck and call. Forty ampoules. If James resists he’ll get them all killed. He has no choice but to clean the wounds, dress them with scraps of cloth torn from the patients’ own clothing, with wet cardboard or their filthy, multi-purpose kramas. He thinks in detail about his brother, his mother, and no one seems to notice his tears, a liquid, he believes, that is rich in painkillers. He attempts to clean the broken skin with the salinity of the fluid.

  Sometimes the patients are Khmer Rouge cadre and sometimes they are prisoners who are only being prepared for the next round of interrogation. Before, in Canada, he never wondered how many deaths we can survive, how many deaths we can bear, how many deaths we deserve. He doesn’t know what to do with the children who have become as blank-eyed as the adults.

  A blade of morning light falls in between the wall and the ceiling. The man, they call him Chorn, escorts James back to the storeroom. Before he leaves, the man orders in a bowl of rice soup.

  “Good night, Kwan,” Chorn says through the locked door. James doesn’t answer. On the floor, beside his food, is a letter. It is a single, lined page torn from a notebook. He recognizes Sorya’s handwriting long before he deciphers the Khmer words. The letter is bare of details. It is written to him. She must be here, in Cambodia, somewhere. She did not escape to Bangkok. Sorya writes, They told me that you are safe. That you survived.

  When Chorn returns at nightfall, James says, “What is this?” He has to control every word or they will overflow and hurt him. He says again, “What is this?”

  “I can bring you a letter now and then. This is all I can do.”

  The words don’t make sense to James. They don’t tell him how the letter got here, or what it means. He picks up the sheet of paper, turns it over, looks for the information that is missing.

  “Can you bring her?”

  “That depends,” the man says.

  James takes a breath and the fetid air sinks sharply into his lungs. “You want to make every one of us small. Every one of us like you. Is that it?”

  Chorn says nothing, he closes his eyes. He has a sharp face, a beak of a nose, and long, dark lashes, he has an armoured quiet that nothing James understands can penetrate.

  “Listen,” Chorn says. His voice is low and the words come so fast, they seem to evaporate as soon as he speaks. “Listen. I’m trying to help you. There is no other way. You want to know what we need from you? Everyone has to work. That’s all. It’s simple. There is no divide any longer between work and life, between life and death, between you and the world, between the world and Angkar. If you act correctly, you are the enemy, if you act incorrectly, you are the enemy. These are Angkar’s own words. Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you? A long time ago you were my friend. Don’t you remember?”

  James falters. He says, “You can protect her.”

  Chorn shakes his head. There’s emotion on his face, like a mask that keeps slipping, that he pushes into place or removes at will. James is staring straight into his eyes and the man looks down.

  “You still don’t understand,” Chorn says. “Unless you understand, we will both be accused. Not just her, but you and I as well. In Phnom Penh, you protected me. I never forgot.”

  James tries to wipe the fog, the dust, from his thoughts.

  “How did you get this letter? Explain it to me.”

  “I have all the paper,” Chorn says, lifting his hands, opening his fingers. “All the paper in this district, all the files, are here.”

  Chorn touches James’s shoulder and the shock of the gesture blinds him awake.

  “She made a mistake,” Chorn says slowly, as if he is explaining himself to a child. “Her letters to you are a crime. She should never have tried to reach you. But, now, it’s too late to help her. She has been revealed to the authorities.”

  James is not forced to work in the fields. He is not forced to do anything but wait. He hears a lot of things through the walls and what he hears is so chilling he believes, thought by thought, that he is a monster, that his mind is deforming. There was a woman in this prison. She was born in Phnom Penh but had gone away to study in France. She returned, a doctor also, to serve the country because she believed in the Khmer Rouge and a free Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge caught her in her home village, along with her family, and this woman was arrested and accused. After several days, she wrote her first confession, tortured into writing, claiming, that she was a CIA spy. Tonight an ox-cart came and took her away to a different jail. James had helped prepare her for the journey and he saw her wounds, he saw the sadism of her interrogators, the ruptures on her skin. He wanted to tell her to succumb to her madness because madness is an escape, temporary or permanent, from this. From herself. But it was forbidden to exchange a word. He heard the ox-cart leave, turning up the earth, stuttering over the broken path, and the torturers laughing and saying their goodbyes. He saw this woman’s face.

  Sometimes, Chorn brings him outside, but only at night, only when all is still. A vitamin deficiency is causing his vision to blur so that when he looks up the stars all seem to be falling. Another letter comes a few weeks after the first, also delivered by Chorn. I’m afraid, she has written. Every day I wonder if you will come. What should I do? They are watching me all the time.

  He asks for paper, for a pen. He begs for help.

  “I am very sorry,” the man says. “You cannot. It is far too dangerous.”

  James feels his entire body sickening. “Then you must tell her to stop writing.”

  The man shakes his head, frustrated. “Do you think it is up to me?”

  “For god’s sake, I’m begging you. Tell her to stop writing.”

  They left him alone all day. This is when you lie in the water, when you lie down on the shore of the Pacific and the tide comes in and you have to let it take you. You have to go. You belong to no one, Angkar says, and no one belongs to you, not your mother or your child or the woman you would give your life for. Families are a disease of the past. The only creature under your care is you: your hands, your feet, the hair on your head, your voice. Attachment is what will expose you as a traitor to the revolution, to the change that is coming, that is here. Attachment to the world is a crime. For too long, the people have suffered. For too long they have waited, but their desire is as great as the sea, as thirsty as the dry land.
Even the rivers are cruel.

  He pictured her in detail, her face, her mouth, her stillness. He begged her, in his mind, to stop writing, he wrote his letters to her on the wall of the store room, on the tiled floor. It’s a trap, he told her. It’s a goddamned trap.

  He received another letter: My love. They told me that you are near. They promised to bring you to me and I gave them all the money. I will keep trying to reach you, no matter the consequences. I want to bring about another future, the one I carried in my head for so long, all through the war.

  He started to weep and he couldn’t stop. “Help her,” James said. “Hide her somewhere. Bring her here.”

  Chorn looked at James. “The truth is,” he said quietly, shamefully, “there is no James. I have never known this person James.”

  “Then tell her that he’s dead. Tell her it’s useless to write.”

  Chorn removed a straw bag that was hanging from his shoulder, and from the bag he withdrew bandages, pills, antibiotics, brandy, dressings, even a stethoscope.

  It was fucked up, it was unbelievable. It couldn’t be.

  “All this suffering,” Chorn said, “is for something. You don’t know what this country was like before. You have to trust me.” The man held on to the supplies as if they were religious objects, promises.

  He must be hallucinating. He rubbed his hands over the cement tiles. “She didn’t do anything wrong,” James said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Only a dictator or an idiot would make that claim,” Chorn said. He looked at the ground, at his toes protruding from his worn-down sandals, at the trail of dust he had brought into the already dusty room.

  Chorn said in his quiet, detached way, “Angkar knows about James. But it does not know about Kwan. You see how I have tried to help you? Because some of us have many tricks, some of us have many names. There are people who are loyal only to me, but even I know the limits of what is possible. Look at this,” he said, shaking the pills the way a mother might try to distract her baby. “Look what I found. There is still so much that we can do. Everyone had a different life before but it doesn’t mean we must all go to the same end.

  “Would you find it hard to believe,” Chorn said, “that once, long ago, I was a monk? They came to the temple and they took all the children away. They went and made us into something else.”

  Before, when Dararith was still alive, the three of them had taken the motorcycle to Kep and they had stayed a week on the seaside. The ocean comes into this storeroom and covers it like a drawing. He can see the tide taking morsels of the land, bit by bit, away. That week, Dararith had disappeared for three days, he’d met a French girl with long, wavy hair, he’d offered to take her photograph with his brand-new Leica, but really it was Dararith who should’ve been the model. He was a handsome man with romantic eyes and full lips, a mysterious, colonial sexiness that made the women foolish. In contrast, James was a bore, or at least that’s what Sorya told him, teasingly, looking past him to the sea.

  “And what about you?” he’d asked in English. “If I wanted to take your picture?”

  “I’m the true photographer,” she had answered in Khmer.

  “Take your brother’s camera, then.”

  “I tried!” she said, laughing. “Believe me, I tried. But Dararith, he uses it to meet women, it’s only a toy for him, whereas I know I’m a photographer. If only someone would give me a chance.”

  “What would you shoot?”

  “Once I took a picture of my students at the lycée.”

  He never knew whether she was serious or joking. He was a buffoon, a hippopotamus, sitting beside her.

  “I’m your friend, aren’t I?” she had said on the last night that he saw her.

  “Am I being demoted?”

  “You’re my best friend,” she had said, “and you don’t really know it. You don’t value it.”

  He’d felt belittled. He had wanted to raise his voice: I’m in love with you, is that such a small thing? I’ve loved you since the day I met you, why is that worth so little? Now he wonders how he misunderstood her so badly. How stupid, how arrogant was he, that he couldn’t persuade her to leave for Bangkok, pride had made him unforgivably blind. He’d wanted her to wait for him. In his heart, he’d wanted this, to prove something, because they had both been alone. They had already left their families even before Angkar came. They only had each other.

  “Tell me about Tokyo,” she had said, just like Hiroji. They were like two birds pecking at his head. On the southern borders of the city, rockets were falling. They could see the fighting, like sheaves of fire.

  “There’s nothing much to tell.”

  “They bombed it very badly, didn’t they?”

  “It was Dante’s fifth circle.”

  “I used to teach that poem,” she said. “I taught, ‘Through me is the way to the sorrowful city, through me is the way to the lost people.’ ”

  “Admit it, you have a lover somewhere, don’t you?” he said lightly, wanting to turn the darkness aside. “A boy much nicer than me.”

  “I’m twenty-six years old,” she said. “Everyone around me is married with ten children. I live in a city that’s about to fall to the Khmer Rouge. What can I possibly know about love?”

  “Come with me to Neak Luong. Come tomorrow.”

  She shook her head.

  “Take this money and buy us two tickets for Bangkok.”

  “Honestly, you want to leave Phnom Penh? This heaven.”

  “Do you?”

  She smiled at him, she folded her sadness away. “All this time, I only stayed because of you.”

  The sea, the sea. The words ran in his mind, the future his father had once envisioned, the promises he had kept before he died.

  “Some things don’t end,” she said, kissing his lips. “We both knew, didn’t we? From the very beginning. I knew. You would be the one I loved.”

  What did he say? He had only kissed her. He had treated everything as if it were ephemeral, as if things could only be beautiful if they were passing, if they were mortal. “Can you hear me,” she had whispered one night, thinking he was asleep. He had kept his eyes closed. All those months, he had put on such a show of being brave, he had made a joke of his needs. He had wanted to please her, to keep her, and he didn’t know how.

  He sleeps on the cement tiles, in the prison, segregated from everyone else because he is useful to Chorn. Sometimes the man comes and sits with him. Sometimes he brings a grandchild or a daughter and James gives them medicine, he cleans a wound, he works according to the tasks he is given. His own body is unrecognizable, it is a parody of a human being, mere bones, dark shadows where muscle used to be. Kwan sits in the corner and day by day grows stronger, Kwan feeds memories to James, experiences that are part James, part Dararith and Sorya, part Hiroji, part Chorn. King James is a useless army of invisible men, of stories given and received like bread on the communion line, and it’s the only bread he has to keep him going. King James is a rotten child, he’s losing his mind and also his sight. Piece by piece, day by day, Kwan is taking over, and James is tired now, but he hangs on like a cat at the table because any scrap could be the one that saves him. He dreams of Sorya in the daytime, but never at night. Water seeps down the walls, along the green lines of invading grass, dribbling down to the ground.

  Chorn goes away for many days, and a child, blind in one eye, brings the food. When Chorn returns, sick-looking, he asks James, “Do you know anything about planting rice? About crops?”

  James shakes his head. “But when I was a teenager, I worked one summer in the forest, I felled trees.” It was in Port Hardy, on the northern cusp of Vancouver Island, a job found for him by his mother’s hairdresser. He had learned to swagger in that isolated logging town and give off the impression of solidity.

  Chorn looks at him, skeptical. “With an axe?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Chorn nods, pleased with this information. They sit quietly, and Ch
orn drums his fingertips against his knees. His hands are pale, as if, outdoors in the drenching sun, he keeps them safely hidden in his pockets.

  “What’s it like now?” James asks, breaking the stillness. “In the cities.”

  Chorn waits, without responding, without looking at James, as if Chorn, too, is expecting another person to answer. In the pause, there’s the hard melody of an ox-bell, the only music James has heard in too long, and it seems to stretch like a physical object through the air and knock against the walls of the room.

  “Everything is very organized,” Chorn says. “They are making an archive in which nothing is missing. Every person must write a biography. They must write it many times to ensure that all the details are correct.”

  He prays his hands together to stop the drumming. “Phnom Penh is very still. In fact, it is empty. Every movement you make is like the first one ever made. I thought I was the only one alive. In the market, where the vendors used to be, there are small trees growing. Less than a year but already the jungle has arrived, it is threatening to strangle everything else.

  “They have thousands and thousands of files. I delivered my share as well. I had to sign my name many times because they are terrified of missing pieces. Many times I signed my name.” Chorn runs his hand over his mouth, closes his eyes, and nods. James feels as cold as the walls. “They put me in an apartment. A family’s apartment. There were plates on the table, but the food had rotted. The owner collected stamps. Some were framed on the walls. I was standing there, looking at them, when the telephone rang. I went into the kitchen and the telephone kept ringing and ringing, I thought if I answered I would be punished, I was convinced it was a trap so I just stood there and waited, without moving, I waited for it to stop. Like a child.